Move over women! Indian men are becoming increasingly fashion forward

Men in India are grappling with a brand new problem: they’re running out of wardrobe space. Their closets doth overflow, their accessories have gone forth and multiplied, and their sneakers want a room of their own.Joeanna Rebello Fernandes | TNN | April 02, 2017, 12:47 IST

Men in India are grappling with a brand new problem: they’re running out of wardrobe space. Their closets doth overflow, their accessories have gone forth and multiplied, and their sneakers want a room of their own.

In an office elevator in Gurgaon, a man was overheard telling his chum he’d bought yet another pair of sneakers, making it 20 now. “My wife complains I own more shoes than she does,” he confessed.

Men are shopping for apparel with more vigour than ever. Calling it a trend that has advanced steadily over the last few years, Western fashion intelligentsia have gone so far as to say Men Are Now Shopping Like Women!

Defying conventional wisdom about gendered shopping habits, surveys (like Ogilvy’s in America last year) show that men are exhibiting the sort of shopping behaviour traditionally associated with women: they too feel the endorphin surge of a sale and are casting around for style advice, succumbing more to impulse and lingering longer in the aisles.

It flies in the face of popular wisdom: Men hate shopping, women love it. Men are on a mission; women on a journey. Men make quick work of a store; women wander.

In India, where internet retail for apparel and footwear has grown by 193% over store-based retail which shrunk by 2.9% over the last two years (Euromonitor International), online retailers are thrilled with the crossover.

Koovs, which markets Western street styles and limited edition designer pieces, says men contribute to 40% of their sales, spending almost as much time per ‘session’ (6.5 minutes) as women (7 minutes). Spending almost equal money, they average Rs 2,000 a month, says Jabong, also claiming a 40% male customer-base. Men buy higher value, but fewer units compared to women, who are still led by discounts (and return products more often than men). But both sexes average out at checkout.

Myntra, on the other hand, says it has more men than women checking out.60:40. “Men are getting increasingly fashion forward, especially in tier 2 and 3 cities,” says Sivaram Kowta, vice president, Men’s Apparel, Myntra. With an eye on developing their male clientele, Myntra recently introduced a Plus Size store which accounts for 13% of men’s apparel sales. “And we recently organised a Mantastic Day sale for the first time. It saw a great response and we plan to host the next edition soon,” says Kowta.

They’re calling it the Menaissance — men’s awakening to fashion and style. According to The Wall Street Journal’s style maven, Ray Smith, men are now even willing to be called stylish or fashionable. It’s not a dirty word anymore, he remarks.

Thank god, say menswear retailers who’ve been watching the sales needle arc upwards. Euromonitor International’s 2016 research on the apparel and footwear market in India says the retail of menswear has grown from Rs 1,163 billion in sales in 2014 to Rs 1,499 billion in 2016, a 29% rise, against a 24.7% sales hike for women in the same period.Sure, say industry watchers, menswear is bound to outstrip womenswear since working men outnumber women, and get paid more. But it’s not just that there are more of them buying; they’re buying more too.

A generation ago, their fathers’ taxonomy went no farther than ‘home wear’, ‘work wear’, and ‘wedding wear’. They now need an outfit for every occasion, whether it’s working, working out, socialising, dating, travelling or golfing. No one shirt fits all. Take pants for example, they branch out into skinny, slim, straight, cargo, classic… which, when coupled with colour, texture, fabric, print, embellishment, distress, generates the kind of confounding variety that could soon alter brain function (it is apparently men’s left-brain dependence that directs their purposeful shopping).

“Earlier men only dressed for utility, they’re now dressing for vanity,” says fashion blogger Purushu Arie. They’re also dressing for Instagram. Social media is a prominent image-builder, and men are taking their cues from it. Arie, who also designs apparel and parades them on Insta, is developing not only a fanbase but a clientele on the platform.

“I get direct messages from millennials asking where I’ve picked something from and if I designed it. I’ve taken orders for weddings via Instagram,” says Arie, whose designs include gender-neutral jumpsuits. As a student at NIFT, few of his peers wanted to design for men because they felt the market was narrow and boring. “But then our faculty would tell us, if you won’t design it, you don’t give them the option of something new,” he recalls, “When Hedi Slimane, the former Dior Homme creative director, introduced skinny jeans for men in 2005, everyone thought they would tank.” Now, even the doodhwala wears skinnies.

Older, moneyed men, more selective in their shopping, still prefer brick-and-mortar stores but to keep them coming, retailers are reshaping their spaces, laying out more than jackets and jazz. Rare Rabbit, an Indian upscale menswear label that retails upward of Rs 3,000, sells art, Italian paper backpacks and ceramic lapel pins alongside clothes.

Creative director, Manish Poddar, believes well-travelled Indian men want to feel the shop to be seduced to shop. Imagine the seduction if a customer spent Rs 6 lakh on a Dutch copper cycle artwork when all he came for was probably a pair of pants!

“Men don’t want the same high-street fare these days; they want to stand out and be noticed and complimented,” says Poddar. A generation ago, they’d have given a left leg to blend in. Rare Rabbit’s customers spend about Rs 7,000 to Rs 8,000 per visit.Interestingly, of all his 11 stores, the ones in Baroda, Ahmedabad, Surat and Rajkot sell best, he says, indicative perhaps of fewer options in those cities, but plenty of spending spirit.

Dr Sibichan Mathew, professor of Fashion Management Studies at NIFT, Delhi, reminds us that behaviours that have thus far defined apparel shopping by gender are in fact evolutionary. “Being hunters once, men go straight for the kill — they have a clear focus on what they want, go into a store and get it. Women, being gatherers, cast around. And they shop because it’s therapeutic, it entertains.”

If buying behaviour is changing, could it be that shopping is beginning to hit men in the same sweet spot that it does women? That like a pair of stilettos, a pair of high-tops is retail therapy too? If the shoe fits...